The over-saturating of the online market has made promoting events challenging for artists, yet certain avenues still remain effective, provided your advertising is targeted correctly. In this piece we look at how Facebook events can be used to reach your ideal audience.
_______________________
Guest post by Avery T. Phillips from the Dotted Music Blog
Music documentaries often talk about how older artists would run around town with the fliers they’d printed off at Kinkos. There’s a kind of nostalgia and glorification of harder times that goes along with these stories.
It’s an absolute novelization at how hard these artists worked to get people to go to their shows and performances. They go into detail about how they took out ads in magazines and newspapers, and how they got their big break because one rich label exec happened to see a flyer and had nothing better to do that night.
That’s all well and great, but people don’t just see flyers nowadays and think “I don’t have anything going on tonight; I’ll go see an artist I’ve never heard of.” They have plenty of things to do at home thanks to technology, and besides — there’s usually too many unheard-of local artists for them to keep up with all of it and want to keep spending $5-10 per event for artists they don’t know about.
The easiest way to get the word about your music out is the internet — social media specifically. But even that is incredibly oversaturated. Every artist uses social media — and we can learn a lot from them about how to market ourselves on those platforms. However, they have huge followings, and many times we are still trying to build ours up!
So we have to ask: how do you reach the people you want to reach? There has to be a more straightforward way of reaching your target audience. People in your local artist community may be best reached by word of mouth and, oddly enough, by Facebook events.
Your Target Audience
If you’re a young artist who’s new on the scene, you won’t be able to make it anywhere in the music world if you can’t draw people to your shows and performances. For many younger artists, Facebook events are primarily the way they bring people out to such showcases.
Yes, a lot of promotion is done through personal artist pages, but this doesn’t always work awesomely. A lot of times with paid Facebook promotions, you’re not necessarily attracting people who are interested in your local product, although filters can help with this. With Facebook events, the people invited to and going to the events are directly involved in what you’re “selling” them, to borrow the colloquialism.
Personalized Content
Sharing content constantly, divided among all of your online platforms, is important. Using Facebook events is a good way of delivering such content (primarily music) to those who may realistically be interacting with you soon through a concert or live performance. In the moments leading up to an event, the Facebook event page is your central hub to promote videos, your music, and the like.
See, Facebook limits your post reach from your artist page. Great social media strategiesget unfortunately buried because Facebook wants you to pay them for views. What’s so great about Facebook events is that unless notifications for an event are turned off, anyone “going” or “interested” in an event will see the notifications you put in the event — and you don’t have to pay a dime.
Word of Mouth
Facebook events have, in some regard, replaced word of mouth. People see their friends are going on their newsfeed and they want to go too. If you can get five of your friends to go, chances are one or two of them will bring someone else. If everyone in your group or band can get five people to go, that doubles the numbers or more.
Likewise, notifications have made less of a need for personal reminders. Anytime someone posts in an event page, everyone going is notified. The day of the event, they’re usually notified as well. So don’t underestimate the importance of Facebook events, because they’re one of the most underutilized but useful means of social media marketing we have in this current day.
Perfect Timing
One of the most important questions you can ask about event page marketing is when the best time to post is. The truth, however, is that there’s not a straightforward answer. Eventbrite recommends posting on Facebook just about any time in the afternoon. 3 pm on Wednesdays, 12-1 pm on the weekends, and 1-4 pm on Thursdays and Fridays are the primary Facebook posting times they recommend.
Writing in the event page the day of the event is also a great way to promote your music to showgoers. Everyone could use a reminder the day of – after all, people have a lot going on! Those follow ups at the right times and on the day of the event (again, afternoon works best) are essential to getting a good turn out. If you do this right, you have a better chance of having a pretty well attended event!
How have you found Facebook marketing to be useful? Let us know in the comments below!
Avery T. Phillips is a freelance human being with too much to say. She loves nature and examining human interactions with the world. Comment or tweet her @a_taylorian with any questions or suggestions.